New Diagnostic Framework Digs Into the Unconscious Life of Organisations

Why do so many corporate transformations fail despite careful planning, generous budgets and committed leadership? A new conceptual paper published in Discover Psychology argues that the answer often lies far beneath the surface of org charts and strategy decks, in the unconscious emotional life of organisations themselves. Researchers Claas Lahmann, Olaf Rank and Anne-Maria Müller of the University of Freiburg have introduced the Systematic Multidimensional Organisational Assessment, or SyMOA, a framework that borrows the logic of clinical psychodynamic diagnosis and applies it to companies, hospitals, agencies and other social systems. The work, published as an open-access review, is the first step in a broader research programme whose operationalisation and empirical validation will follow in later studies.

The starting point for the framework is a sobering observation from the change management literature: intentional change processes are frequently slow, meet resistance and fail outright, and they are a significant source of stress for employees. Scholars such as McFillen and colleagues have speculated that the failure to conduct an accurate organisational diagnosis, and the related failure to build readiness for change, plays a major role in the high rate of failed initiatives. Yet the diagnostic models most widely used in practice, including the McKinsey 7 S model, Weisbord’s six-box model and the Burke–Litwin model, have been criticised for presenting heterogeneous, atomistic categories without specifying how the factors interact, for omitting elements such as the external environment, and for lacking strong theoretical foundations. They offer managers step-by-step checklists, the authors argue, but little insight into why resistance arises or what lies beneath surface phenomena.

SyMOA is grounded in the systems psychodynamic tradition that emerged at the Tavistock Institute in London in the 1950s and 1960s. That approach combines open-systems theory, which sees organisations as self-sustaining systems in constant exchange with their environment, with Freudian and object-relations theories, which hold that unconscious processes, hidden conflicts and anxieties powerfully shape human behaviour. As researcher Yiannis Gabriel has succinctly put it, in a psychodynamic view conflict is unavoidable and constitutive of the subject. Systems psychodynamic scholars examine how organisations develop mechanisms to manage competing drives, such as the desire for change versus the desire for stability, or the need for independence versus the need for belonging, and they focus on group behaviour and the collective unconscious rather than isolated individuals. What has been missing, the Freiburg team contends, is a structured diagnostic system built directly from these insights.

To fill that gap, the authors turned to clinical practice. Their template is the Operationalised Psychodynamic Diagnosis, or OPD, a well-researched multiaxial system used in German-speaking psychotherapy that captures a patient’s psychological state across experience of illness, interpersonal relationships, life-determining unconscious conflicts and structural functioning. The OPD is typically administered through a semi-structured interview, and the resulting psychodynamic profile informs therapy planning and evaluation. The researchers stress that transferring psychodynamic concepts from the individual to the organisational level does not mean mapping intrapsychic processes onto companies. Instead, following the systems psychodynamic tradition, organisational structures, routines and relational patterns are understood as socially organised responses to anxiety, uncertainty and conflict, an abstraction of underlying principles rather than a literal transfer.

The resulting framework assesses organisations along three interrelated dimensions. The first, the organisation’s inner functioning, examines current challenges and how they are attributed, whether to technology, workforce, culture or an integrated socio-technical system, along with resources, barriers to change and organisational climate. Beneath these visible features lie the inner workings: regular, repetitive conscious and unconscious patterns through which the organisation deals with itself and the external world. These are rated across five categories, each considered both inwardly and toward the environment: internal and external awareness, regulatory capacity, communication, attachment, and organisational defence mechanisms. These workings change slowly over time and can be rated from well functioning to low functioning.

The second dimension addresses internal relational patterns and dynamics, which are shaped by organisational structure and the demands of communication, cooperation and coordination, but also by interpersonal affect and the history of shared interaction. Assessment focuses on observable relational behaviour and conscious emotional experience in specific situations, at horizontal levels such as between teams and vertical levels such as between senior management and employees. The approach explicitly captures how each party in an interaction experiences itself and the other, illuminating recurring and potentially dysfunctional patterns of relationship.

The third dimension probes the organisation’s unconscious conflicts. Just as people carry an inner experience shaped by early experiences and proven survival strategies, the authors argue, companies accumulate conflicts that begin as visible tensions between teams or managers and gradually shift inward, becoming part of the organisational DNA. Conflict here does not mean open dispute but the struggle between contradictory needs, such as how much freedom versus how much guidance, or how much responsibility versus how much security. When such basic conflicts are adequately resolved, an organisation can flex situationally between the poles of need; when it cannot, it rigidly pursues one pole, and the conflict is repeatedly activated by situational factors during the organisation’s development.

Conceptually, SyMOA is framed by a metamodern sensibility, drawing on the philosophy of Vermeulen and van den Akker, which holds modernist rigor and postmodern reflexivity in productive tension rather than resolving them. In practice this means organisational phenomena are analysed using structured dimensions while remaining open to multiple, potentially conflicting interpretations. The framework also aligns with critical theory’s project of revealing entrenched power relations: organisational culture, the authors note, can operate both as a collective social defence against anxiety, in the tradition of Menzies and Schein’s concept of learning anxiety, and as a subtle form of control in which employees internalise corporate values and police themselves. Through reification, historically contingent power relations become naturalised and appear as objective features of organisational life, resistant to critique. By surfacing hidden defences and covert emotional processes, SyMOA is intended to make these barriers to change visible and contestable.

The authors are careful to position the work as deliberately conceptual. SyMOA is not a universal or prescriptive model but one possible analytical framework, and its dimensions are conceptual categories derived from systems psychodynamic theory rather than validated measures. A companion study protocol published in JMIR Research Protocols outlines the next phases: a structured interview guide, application in instrumental case studies, and testing of intercoder reliability, construct validity, content validity and known-groups validity, with safeguards including informed consent, confidentiality, peer debriefing and triangulation to manage the ethical risks of deep, potentially sensitive inquiry. The authors also draw an analogy to psychotherapy research, where interventions succeed more often when structural aspects, relationship dynamics and conflicts are assessed in a differentiated way and matched to a client’s stage of readiness for change, from pre-contemplation through maintenance. If that logic holds for organisations, they suggest, a SyMOA profile could indicate an organisation’s readiness for change and help tailor interventions accordingly. Whether the framework can deliver on that promise will depend on the empirical studies now underway, but the ambition is clear: to give organisations a clinical-grade instrument for understanding not just what they do, but why they keep doing it.

Subject of Research: A systems psychodynamic diagnostic framework for assessing unconscious organisational dynamics

Article Title: A systems psychodynamic framework for understanding and assessing organisational dynamics

Article References: Lahmann, C., Rank, O., & Müller, A.-M. (2026). A systems psychodynamic framework for understanding and assessing organisational dynamics. Discover Psychology, 6(1), Article 272. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00885-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00885-3

Keywords: organisational diagnostics, systems psychodynamics, organisational change, psychodynamic theory, organisational culture, clinical diagnostics, metamodernism, critical theory, organisational psychology, change management, OPD, organisational dynamics